make do and mend

It's forecast to get colder by the end of the week.  Not frosts, yet, or at least not in north Essex, but still it's time to start thinking about bringing the tender geraniums and pots of Tulbaghia and evergreen Agapanthus under cover.  Except that under cover was broken (the latest vogue political word) or not fit for purpose (going back to the previous administration), which is to say that one pane of glass in my greenhouse roof had slid out until approximately half of it was unsupported, then snapped off under its own weight, shattering into a thousand tiny pieces which it took the Systems Administrator about two hours to pick up, and leaving a large hole in the greenhouse roof.

The SA researched greenhouse glass on-line, and discovered that such a thing scarcely exists. Nowadays the material of choice is polycarbonate, lighter to handle, and much safer.  The SA measured up the roof bay, and ordered the requisite piece of 4 millimetre polycarbonate, which arrived extremely promptly, wrapped in a tremendous amount of bubble wrap.  I felt rather bad about that, since our recycling does not accept bubble wrap, but I suppose the packaging for glass would have been even worse.

The polycarbonate slid beautifully into its runners, once the SA had scraped the moss out of them with a screwdriver, and fitted exactly.  As the saying goes in carpentry, measure twice, cut once. One little screw in the wooden frame at the bottom of the pane, to stop it sliding out again, and the job was done.  I was at liberty to spend the rest of the morning moving pots about, and trying to work out how the dahlias were going to fit in as well (they aren't, not without a distortion in the space-time continuum of Douglas Adams magnitude).

After lunch, at my request, the SA came with me to remove the netting from the roof of the fruit cage, and replace the worst of the damaged bars that were bent by snow.  I've had the replacement aluminium tubes sitting in the garage for a very long time, as mending the fruit cage has never risen to the top of either of our lists of Things To Do.  I thought it would be a good time to change the bent roof bars over, because it was (a) not cold, so we wouldn't be working with numb, frozen fingers and (b) not windy, so we would be able to think straight, whereas if we left it until next spring there would be a thousand other things to do, and next thing we knew, embryonic fruits would be forming on the bushes and we'd be crashing around knocking them off.

The Systems Administrator said optimistically that it would be a quick job.  In fact, removing the top net took some time, as it was held on with cable ties, and we had to cut through every tie without cutting through the net, plus extract the various twigs that had grown up through the net. It came off intact, however, and I bundled it up in a black dustbin bag and put it away in the garage before a cat could get tangled in it.

Then the real fun started.  We could not get the top bars off the uprights.  That is the potted version of what turned into a protracted and hideous struggle.  The cage as supplied came with dinky fittings that slid tightly into the tops of the poles, each with a screw hole in the centre. Mushroom shaped fittings with a protruding screw sat on top of the poles, the screw went through holes in the ends of the cross bars, and screwed down into the fitting on top of the upright.  After several years of outdoor exposure (which is where most people use their fruit cages) the screw had seized hard into the pole fitting.  It would not unscrew, with a manual or electric screwdriver.  It would not be jemmied off, with an old chisel or a proper floorboard jemmy, and it would not be struck off by repeated blows from underneath with a lump hammer.  All that happened was that the upright began to lift out of the ground.  Nor would the dinky fitting slide out of the pole.  It was well and truly stuck fast, and would not be prised out.

In the end the Systems Administrator sawed the top three centimetres off the upright, which knackered a hacksaw blade, and still didn't solve the problem of removing the screw fitting from the ends of any less badly bent bars which we want to reuse.  The SA suggested that maybe I should buy a proper cage made out of solid bars like angle iron, instead of persisting with the wretched aluminium tubed structure, but as I explained, I'd gone for hollow aluminium tubes in the first place on grounds of cost.  If we were going to throw that away and replace it with a solid metal cage, we might as well just give up and have the fruit delivered from Harrods.  The plan we came up with was to buy new blades for the electric hacksaw, run power up to the fruit cafe, cut the tops off all the poles, the SA to make wooden block tops to fit over them all (which will give back the height we've just lost shortening them) and screw the cross poles into the wooden blocks.  It would still be almost as easy just to order in the fruit when required.

The supplier of this seized solid, impossible to extend or renovate fruit cage was a company called Knowle Nets.  I leave it to you whether you want to buy one of their cages.